A new IT survey is the latest to shed light on the data encryption habits of IT professionals, revealing that more than a third send sensitive information outside corporate networks without first encrypting it.

A new study reveals good and bad news when it comes to cloud services adoption. On one hand, businesses are more comfortable storing data in the cloud. On the other hand, some businesses are too comfortable, and as a result aren't thinking about cloud security.

A recent blog post from an IT publication touched on a topic we've discussed before – the ability for IT service providers and their clients to retain ownership over the encryption key they use to back up their data. It's a factor that could be particularly crucial to secure data management in sensitive sectors like healthcare and government.

Why encrypt? FCW, a tech blog for government IT professionals, recently reported that the shift to cloud services has led to new challenges with respect to encrypted data backup. Although, at least on the surface level, data encryption is relatively similar in the cloud when compared with traditional storage measures, one challenge in encrypting data to the cloud involves encryption key ownership.

Risks to information security are headline news, and sophisticated safeguards are in higher demand from business customers. Experts say that in 2014, data encryption at every level will become a must-have technology for more businesses, as it’s one of the best ways to guard data from the wrong hands.

Rajiv Gupta, Founder and CEO of cloud security software provider Skyhigh Networks, predicted that unencrypted data will begin to disappear in 2014. Gupta said that regardless of where it’s located, companies will want all data to be encrypted. Encryption will become increasingly critical in the cloud, he adds, because fewer users will want to store data on endpoint devices.

Security is an obvious pain point for many businesses thinking about cloud backup, and often the best way for MSPs to earn customer trust is to use a solution that puts a priority on data protection. We talk to our partners about this a lot, and we strive to help them communicate our backup solution’s security benefits to their own customers.

That’s the question some IT professionals asked amid reports that two researchers were able to infiltrate code for file-hosting service Dropbox, with some experts emphasizing encryption key ownership as a critical sticking point in true cloud security.

Researchers Dhiru Kholia and Przemysław Wegrzyn released a whitepaper at the USINEX security conference in August detailing how they were able to reverse engineer the Dropbox client – despite prior belief that this was not possible.